DK GreenRoots

(One of the thousands of endosulfan victims in Kasaragod, Kerala. The district was hosed down with endosulfan for over twenty years by a Kerala state run agency, all for the sake of a blemish free cashew crop. Indian activists often refer to it as the "second Bhopal," but as the numbers continue to rise an outsider cannot help but think in terms of another Minamata.)

Last month, the Review Committee of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants effectively declared endosulfan a POP, setting the stage for a global ban to come into effect in 2011, after just a couple more rounds of bureaucratic rigamarole.

Finally.

Dolan Miller used to live in the remote Antelope Valley region of Nevada's Lander County. Of course, all of Lander County is remote as a 2002 population estimate pegged it at 5,691. With a land area of 5,621 square miles, the county population density is actually less than 1 person per square mile. 

During the years 1984 through 2005, Miller's business in the valley was growing alfalfa. He was helped on the farm by his brother, Daren Kay Miller, who was a welder and heavy equipment operator. 

Daren began to get headaches, which progressively got more severe. In 2004, a year or so after Daren's headaches began, Dolan lost his 38-year-old brother to a rare brain cancer. 

Dolan claims that at least five of his neighbors had been diagnosed with cancers during the last ten years. Recently, at least nine residents of Antelope Valley, population 200, have been formally diagnosed with various cancers or immune diseases.

This might have something to do with it.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a newly-released study, funded by England's Food Standards Agency (FSA) which claims that organic foods offer no superior nutritional value to their conventional counterpart. Since that time, media sources have, for the most part, been unwilling to go further in their reporting than the summary points of the FSA's press release. Journalistically lazy, yet predictable.

I want to be clear. The study is pure, unmitigated bullshit.

The FSA study somehow neglected the not-so-small matter of pesticides in conventional foods. A peach sprayed with inarguably toxic chemicals does not become absent of vitamins. Yet to focus only on the nutrients and ignore the deadly toxins would be like writing a biography about O.J. Simpson which details his hall-of-fame football career with no mention of the Nicole Brown/Ron Goldman murders.

And speaking of peaches...